pjmorris

And if that book doesn't appeal, Dr.Weinberg (he'd prefer 'Jerry' though) has an entire sub-genre of really useful books on humans doing software development. Three other favorites: 'How to Become a Technical Leader', the four-volume 'Quality Software Management', and the click-bait-titled but terrific 'The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving & Getting Advice Successfully'.

He joined IBM in the 50's, led the design of the telemetry system for NASA's Mercury project in the 60's, aimed to put humans at the center of software development with 'The Psychology of Computer Programming', and spent the rest of his life working on helping people do software development well together. IMO, any time you spend digging in to his large catalog will be well repaid.

My point isn't about a particular breed of nectarines, it's that they are part of a class of goods - food - that isn't optional at any time for any human on earth, and laws have tended to support the view that survival is a fundamental human value. In cases where the choice is between survival and innovation, it isn't unreasonable for survival to take precedence.

I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.

What this made me think of is life before computers, where people mildly handshake, create agreements on the fly. "Where communication is fuzzy and locked in on an individual basis."

TBH, to me, this imagined future looks a lot like it'd have all the problems we already have.

Margaret Thatcher said "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

I feel like the problem that Greenspan, Bernanke, and friends have found is that the problem with capitalism is that you never run out of the government's money.

"I'll be gone, you'll be gone" - Wall Street phrase.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - J.M. Keynes

I pull from these articles when teaching:

'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719

'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2

If you're going to invoke the UN, you should show the UN resolution calling for action in Venezuela.

I appreciate the enthusiasm for LAN parties and will talk to my gaming friends about getting one going.

Related possibilities:

1. Dust off some DVDs and a DVD player, pop some popcorn and watch a movie or two. Explore the extended editions, commentaries, alternate scenes, etc.

2. Dust off some CDs and a player and jam. My 2008 Honda has a CD player, I'm not restricted to streaming Spotify through a Bluetooth adapter :)

3. Dig up an N64 console, Goldeneye, the friends you played against back when, and order some pizza.

4. Go find a local bookstore, new or used, and buy a book.

I'm sure there are a dozen ideas I'm not thinking of, feel free to plug them in.

I confess that I had this in mind. Is it time to start running LAN parties again?

I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.

Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.

Funny, I am an FPC Bulldog, class of '80, then moved to Ormond to go to DBCC.

Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.

I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.

Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.

I agree that the consequences are greater. There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:

1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”

2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...

True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace!”

Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'

I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.

TBH, I was probably closer to 80 miles than 60 before we moved. to Daytona... Flagler Beach. You?

We lived ~60 miles North of the Cape when I was a young boy, and watching the Saturn V's go on the way to the moon was a forming experience.

Yes.

"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]

[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'

I think your original point stands; I was not intending to contradict it, only to offer a possible explanation. The Overton window of what is seen as possible and necessary in US policy has shifted from, say, Social Security and Medicare, to tax cuts. IMO, party labels do more to obscure than reveal in these days, whatever the awfulnesses and benefits of either party may be.

That's because all the Democrats are Republicans.

"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/finance/137156-obama-says-hed-be-...

UBW cannot be low overhead I suppose.

There would be overhead in asking people to do something (UBW) rather than simply offering money (UBI). It strikes me that the benefits of being able to limit unemployment directly rather than indirectly, of being able to direct community work that supports all of us, of more people being able to pay their bills instead of wondering how to do so, and of putting a floor under private sector wages and benefits is worth the overhead involved.

I'd note that UBI also requires administrative effort and expense.

What motivation do I have to do the work if I can’t get fired?

As the other poster described, you've still got to work to get paid. It's a job, not just a paycheck. Another poster described the problems with hiring people who are not able to work. UBW shouldn't replace mental health facilities or jails... although I suspect that it'd reduce the number of people who need either of those facilities. I'd say that both of these types of problems are relatively small compared to the population and to the benefits that a UBW program would provide. Pilot UBW programs might help assess the validity of the above theories.

Agreed.

I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI: have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic Work.'

Beyond spending government money to take care of the country and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they want to hire employees.

I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for the individual and the community they are a part of.

"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."

- Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)

I lucked in to meeting him once, in Cambridge. A gentle intellectual giant.

I repeatedly borrow this quote from his 1980 Turing Award speech, 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'... "At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modern software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution."

My interpretation is that whether shifting from delegation to programmers, or to compilers, or to LLMs, the invariant is that we will always have to understand the consequences of our choices, or suffer the consequences.

Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else.

As economist Stevie Wonder once said, "When you believe in things that you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way"

capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization

For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.

I spend a lot of time reading the Bible, and examples aren't coming to mind. Can you give some examples?

It's a great analogy. I first came across it in Gerald Weinberg's 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit', where he spends some time talking about burnout, what it means, and how to get out when you find your way in.

In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients.

We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.

Jerry Weinberg wrote a number of books to this point, starting with 1971's 'The Psychology of Computer Programming.' Here's what he had to say a decade or so later...

"The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always a problem.

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem." [0]

Everything he wrote is worth the time to read.

[0] Weinberg, Gerald. "The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully", 1986